Ecommerce SEO

First published in 2014, rewritten in 2026 so the advice holds today.

There isn't a website today that can afford to ignore SEO. If Google and other search engines can't find you, your customers largely can't either, and outspending your way to visibility with paid ads only works if you have a genuinely large budget. For most UK online retailers, SEO remains the most cost-effective route to being found.

This article was originally written with Magento stores in mind. Magento is still widely used, though since Adobe acquired the company in 2018 the enterprise version has been sold as Adobe Commerce. The principles below apply equally whichever platform you use, whether that's Adobe Commerce, Shopify, BigCommerce or something else.

Search intent, not keyword stuffing

If you sell black shoes for men, the old advice was to repeat "black shoes for men" across every page as many times as you could get away with. That approach is not just outdated, it can actively harm you. Google's algorithms have long been able to spot keyword stuffing and will penalise pages that do it.

What replaced it is writing for search intent: understanding what a real customer is trying to find or achieve, then answering that clearly. In practice this still means using longer, more descriptive and often local phrases rather than repeating a single generic term, but the goal is now to be genuinely useful and specific rather than to hit a keyword density target.

Unique content, still non-negotiable

Say you sell one product in 25 colours and want a separate page for each. That's still a sound structural idea. It only works, however, if each page has genuinely unique content rather than a template with the colour word swapped out.

Duplicate or near-duplicate content continues to cause real problems: Google may choose which version to rank (often not the one you'd prefer), or simply not bother indexing the rest. If you can't write unique, useful copy for every variant, you're usually better off with one page that lists the colour options, using variant selectors rather than separate thin pages.

Control what gets indexed

Most stores carry pages that aren't there to sell anything: About Us, Contact Us, Feedback, internal search results, filtered category URLs, and so on. Ask whether each one needs to be indexed. Pages with little unique value can dilute how search engines assess the overall quality of your site, and at scale (particularly with faceted navigation on larger catalogues) they can also waste crawl budget.

Use noindex tags, canonical tags and robots.txt sensibly to keep search engines focused on the pages that matter: your category and product pages, and any genuinely useful content pages. This is more important now than it was a decade ago, since larger, more complex catalogues generate far more of these low-value URLs by default.

Fresh content, and a lot more besides

Google has always rewarded content that's kept current, and that's still true. If your product range barely changes from year to year, you need a deliberate plan for adding fresh, relevant content: updated product descriptions, buying guides, a blog, customer Q&A, or genuine customer reviews.

What's changed is everything sitting alongside this. Site speed and Core Web Vitals are now direct ranking factors. Mobile experience is judged first, not as an afterthought, since Google has indexed and ranked sites primarily on their mobile version for some years. Structured data (schema markup) for products, reviews and pricing helps you earn richer listings in search results. And Google's guidance now talks explicitly about experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T), which for an ecommerce site means real product knowledge, genuine reviews and clear information about who's behind the store.

If you're still using Universal Analytics data or reports to judge any of this, note that it was replaced by GA4 in 2023, so make sure your measurement setup reflects current tools before you act on old assumptions.

The takeaway

The specifics of ecommerce SEO have moved on since keyword density and meta keyword tags mattered, but the underlying discipline hasn't: write genuinely useful, unique content for the pages that deserve to rank, keep search engines away from the pages that don't, and treat site speed, mobile experience and structured data as part of the same job rather than optional extras. Get those fundamentals right and you're building on solid ground, whatever platform your store runs on.